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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Modern Sentimentalism: Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xz0m5fh Author Mendelman, Lisa Anne Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Modern Sentimentalism: Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Lisa Anne Mendelman 2015 © Copyright by Lisa Anne Mendelman 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Modern Sentimentalism: Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America by Lisa Anne Mendelman Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Michael A. North, Chair “Modern Sentimentalism” chronicles the myriad ways in which sentimentalism evolves as modernism emerges. I demonstrate that sentimental aesthetics are more complex than we have thought and that these aesthetics participate in modern literary innovation. I likewise demonstrate that modernity, and the American interwar period in particular, enjoys a more complex relation to the sentimental than we have understood, and that twentieth-century constructs of gender and emotion equally revise and restyle sentimental precedent. Finally, I demonstrate that, when it comes to analyzing historical cultures of feeling, contemporary theories of affect have much to gain from archival methods. Synthesizing these claims, I identify a new form of feeling in modern aesthetic experience. Neither an idealized lapse into the past nor a naïve vision of the future, what I call “modern sentimentalism” most often registers the ironic consciousness of an enduring sentimental impulse. ii “Modern Sentimentalism” thus overturns conventional notions of sentimentalism as a nineteenth-century style antithetical to modern artistic innovation and to representations of modern sensibility. Participating in recent efforts to contextualize modernism and adding new historical and formalist dimensions to theories of twentieth-century sentimentality and affect, I reconstruct sentiment’s authoritative influence in the interwar period’s shifting constructions of gender, race, and sexuality; emergent concepts of emotional experience like “ambivalence” and “empathy”; and evolving literary interests like irony and stream-of-consciousness narration. “Modern Sentimentalism” thus enriches our understanding of the originality and experimentation that characterize modernist-era literary production. At the same time, this project elucidates an archive of fiction by female authors, including lesser-known novels by canonical figures like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and texts by under-studied authors like Anita Loos, Frances Newman, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These authors idiosyncratically revise and update the aesthetic paradigm that forms a modern woman writer’s most obvious inheritance, but their novels collectively establish that interwar concepts of gender, emotion, and literature do not simply break with a sentimental past. Rather, these authors and their inventive modern novels signal how sentimentalism transforms with the times. iii The dissertation of Lisa Anne Mendelman is approved. Ellen DuBois Kathleen McHugh Richard Yarborough Michael A. North, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Sex Without Consequence: American Fiction and Femininity Between the Wars 1–20 CHAPTER 1 “An un-sentimental sort of success”: Willa Cather’s Modern Sentimentalism 21–73 CHAPTER 2 Sentimental Satire and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 74–98 CHAPTER 3 Feeling Hard-Boiled: Frances Newman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin 99–124 CHAPTER 4 An Ambivalent Tradition: Race and Modern Sentimentalism 125–74 CONCLUSION After Happily Ever After: Marriage, Maternity, and the Future of the Modern Woman 175–197 APPENDIX Modern Sentimentalism in Digital Terms 198–202 Works Cited 203–29 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As William Saroyan once observed, whether or not one’s writing is sentimental, it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being. My debts of gratitude are many. UCLA, and the Department of English in particular, has been a phenomenal place to grow as a scholar. I am grateful to UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures and the Roter Research Fellowship for supporting my research in its early stages; the English Department, the Friends of English, and Graduate Division have generously seen it through. Richard Yarborough, Kathleen McHugh, and Ellen DuBois have provided invaluable feedback and mentorship at every turn. With equal measures of brilliance and patience, Michael North has transformed and improved this project and my thinking from the inside out. I am likewise indebted to Gordon Hutner and my anonymous readers at American Literary History for their expansion and enhancement of my work. I am lucky to abound in generous readers and incisive interlocutors. Mitchell Thornton has been the most generous and incisive of them all. My family of several generations continues to offer living proof that the life of the mind and the life of the heart can be one and the same. I cannot imagine better, more inspiring models for being in the world. My brother Jeff and my parents Betsy and Paul are my best daily reminders that sentimental feeling not only endures but also matures in wonderful, unexpected ways. This project is dedicated to the three of them. vi VITA 2004 B.A., English Stanford University Stanford, CA 2007 M.A., English Stanford University Stanford, CA 2012 C.Phil, English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Mendelman, Lisa. “Feeling Hard-Boiled: Modern Sentimentalism and Frances Newman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin.” American Literary History 26.4 (Winter 2014): 693– 715. ———. “Sentimental Satire in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” The Sentimental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film and Television. Ed. Jennifer A. Williamson, Jennifer Larson, and Ashley Reed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 36–55. vii Sex Without Consequence: American Fiction and Femininity Between the Wars The birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of sentimental feeling. The protagonist of Edna Ferber’s 1917 novel Fanny Herself suggests as much. “I’m through being sentimental,” marketing genius Fanny Brandeis asserts (65). “When a woman of my sort marries it’s a miracle. I’m twenty-six, and intelligent and very successful. A frightful combination. Unmarried women of my type aren’t content just to feel. They must analyze their feelings. And analysis is death to romance” (140). Declaring the end of “just feeling” in the wake of first-wave feminism and Freudian psychology, Fanny nonetheless judges her life by nineteenth-century paradigms of femininity and emotion: marriage is “a miracle,” while her professional success and intellectual capacity present a challenge to a potential suitor and, it seems, to her as well. Fanny’s analytical schema repeatedly returns to sentimental patterns, if only to measure her distance from them. Fanny is indeed a “type”: a Google Ngram search, like a reading of many interwar novels, proves that discourse about the sentimental—the literary mode and its cultural analogs—flourishes at the precise moment its cultural relevance supposedly ceases.1 Despite this Foucauldian paradox, the perception of sentiment’s waning authority in women’s lives and in literary production has been remarkably durable in scholarship on modern femininity and interwar authorship. Even in recent critical work that recovers sentimental aspects of modernist writing, sentimentalism appears as the echo of a past that refuses to go away. “Modern Sentimentalism” overturns these notions. What Fanny perceives, and what critics have failed to note, is not a slow death but a vital rebirth. 1 See Appendix. 1 “Modern Sentimentalism” chronicles the myriad ways in which sentimentalism evolves as modernism emerges. I demonstrate that sentimental aesthetics are more complex than we have thought and that these aesthetics participate in modern literary innovation. I likewise demonstrate that modernity, and the American interwar period in particular, enjoys a more complex relation to the sentimental than we have understood, and that twentieth-century constructs of gender and emotion equally revise and restyle sentimental precedent. Finally, I demonstrate that, when it comes to analyzing historical cultures of feeling, contemporary theories of affect have much to gain from archival methods. Synthesizing these claims, I identify a new form of feeling in modern aesthetic experience. At once experimental and revisionary, modern sentimentalism assimilates changing concepts of gender, emotion, and artistic merit to reinvent the sentimental mode. A Definition of Modern Sentimentalism Signifying genuine emotion and clichéd excess, thoughtful opinion and embodied reaction, sincerity and banality, sentiment has inspired an expansive and frequently contradictory reputation. Sentiment’s affiliated categories—which include a literary tradition, a rhetorical strategy, an individual sensibility, and a cultural ideology—make its analysis that much more difficult. I nonetheless endeavor to distinguish “sentiment” and its variants for the purposes of argument. As I use it, “sentimentalism” refers to the literary mode whose conventions emphasize feeling—corporeal